Color is Pride: True Colors

We’re wrapping up National Poetry Month, and we want to celebrate all of the beautiful things that makes each of you, you. For this Challenge, we’re teaming up once again with our partners at Moleskine to ask you to express your pride in the diverse, amazing pieces of yourself. Submit a poem about something that makes you unique, no matter how big or small, and we want your poetry to be inspired by the idea of color—however you choose to interpret it.

We're looking for poems that use an innovative structure or traditional poetic form and creative use of language, evoke a response, and use the concept of color effectively. We’ll be selecting 15 lucky winners for this Challenge; each of the 15 winners will receive a $2,000 prize and will get the opportunity to work directly with Moleskine on their Pride Month campaign throughout the month of June.

To enter the Challenge:

1. Submit your eligible poetry to Vocal and enter it into the True Colors Challenge

2. If you're selected as one of 15 winners, you'll be contacted by the Moleskine team to be featured in their Pride Month campaign in June.

3. Be sure to follow Vocal and Moleskine on Instagram, so you can keep up with the Pride Month campaign featuring all winners through June.

Judging

For this Challenge, our judges will be looking for submissions that are creative, original, well written, show a knowledge of language and poetic form, and are consistent with the Moleskine brand and pride month campaign.

Judges include:

Daniela Riccardi, CEO of Moleskine, who aims to provide "blank spaces for creativity and imagination to take flight."

Nickole Brown, a poet, editor, teacher, and animal advocate was once the editorial assistant to the late Hunter S. Thompson, currently runs SunJune Literary Collaborative with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, and teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program.

The Vocal Team, comprised of the creative, poetry-loving people who work to build this home for your stories and read all of your submissions all day, every day.

For your poem to be eligible, it must be between 100 and 2,000 words and adhere to our Community Guidelines. Poems published on Vocal and entered into the contest up until May 16, 2021, at 11:59 PM EST will be entered for consideration. Official Rules for the Challenge can be found here. For more information about how to successfully submit your poetry on Vocal, please check out this article on our help center.

By entering the True Colors Challenge, you agree that if you’re selected as one of the 15 winners, you’ll be contacted by the Moleskine team in order to take part in their June campaign.

The True Colors Challenge is exclusive to Vocal+ members. To learn more and upgrade to Vocal+ visit https://vocal.media/vocal-plus.

To be eligible to win, you must be over the age of 13 and residing in a country where Stripe is available at the time of entry. A complete list of countries where Stripe is available can be found here—winners will need to have a Stripe account created and connected in order to receive the prizes. For this reason, entrants located outside of any of these countries will not be eligible to win.